


The Miracle Worker

by Hth



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: M/M, post-Inferno
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-25
Updated: 2012-07-25
Packaged: 2017-11-10 17:55:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,731
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/469069
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hth/pseuds/Hth
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rodney works miracles and nobody ever notices.  </p>
<p>Ronon notices.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Miracle Worker

 

Here’s how it goes, how it always goes:

Rodney predicts disaster, and everyone acts like it’s in poor taste to bring it up, like nothing bad would ever happen if Rodney would keep his mouth shut.

People start to believe him. Panic sets in. Sheppard says a bunch of lilting, cooing nonsense that fixes nothing, but convinces people that he’s somehow in control of the situation and that nothing bad will ever happen with Colonel Sheppard’s hand firmly on the tiller of the ship of state. Women swoon.

Actions are taken. Adventures are had.

Everybody wants to know what Rodney is going to do to keep them alive.

_Fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you!_ Rodney imagines screaming. _Die, for all I care! I’m taking a nap; I want to go peacefully._ He says no such thing, and yet people still call him bad-tempered, and everyone acts like it’s in poor taste to...to be Rodney McKay, basically.

They still want to know what Rodney is going to do to keep them alive.

The girl makes eyes at Sheppard.

Sheppard calls him self-centered.

Nobody knows if half of Rodney’s friends are alive or dead. Rodney considers praying, but if there is a Supreme Being, such an entity is unlikely to be fooled into mistaking Rodney for one of the faithful. Anyway, there’s no time.

They don’t die. Sheppard grins at him like everything’s fine, like they’re buddies. Rodney hates the part of himself that feels lucky he’s still one of the cool kids. He asks the girl if she’d maybe like to have dinner sometime, whenever is convenient, or if, maybe, if lunch is better, maybe lunch, sometime, if there’s a time when she’s good – available – free, rather, free for lunch or dinner or

She looks very sad and says that she doesn’t think now is a good time, seeing as how there’s been that little mishap with her now-uninhabitable homeworld and she just doesn’t feel up to it. Rodney says he totally understands. He’s tremendously disappointed, because he likes her, likes her a lot. Sheppard waves jauntily at her from across the bridge. He won’t get a date either, but he is not disappointed because he never gave a damn to begin with.

Rodney doesn’t complain. It’s a cool kid rule. Don’t bite the hand that feeds.

Sheppard gets to name the ship. Rodney was going to call it _The Excelsior_ , which sounds a lot better than _The Orion_ , that’s for sure.

*

It’s over. Rodney’s hands start shaking. His hands only shake after it’s over, which should make him proud, being so cool under pressure and all that, but he’s embarrassed that it happens at all. Even Carson’s hands don’t shake.

The ship does not have a Mr. Coffee.

“What’s an Orion?” Ronon asks.

“It’s a star,” Sheppard says off-handedly, which it absolutely is not.

“Slave girls,” Rodney says testily. “‘The Cage.’”

“Metallica,” Sheppard snaps. “ _Master of Puppets_.”

Teyla and Ronon exchange wary looks.

“Can everybody please step away while I keep this thing from falling out of the sky?” Rodney says. “Pretty please?”

It’s another day in paradise.

*

“Do I get a tour?” Ronon says.

There is no Mr. Coffee, but there is a cup, and somehow there’s hot water, and for a few blissful minutes, there was privacy. Now there’s Ronon, his hip pressed against the table, barely fitting into the kitchenette where Rodney is pretending he has coffee to drink, pretending he’ll be going on a date tonight, pretending there’s somebody he can delegate the mission report to, pretending people think he’s the hero of this story, pretending history will vindicate him.

“Go away,” Rodney says. “Do I like a damn docent?”

Ronon stands there for another minute, then he goes away. People always do what Rodney tells them to, except when they don’t.

*

He takes a little nap.

*

He wakes up with a print on his cheek from a crease in his sleeve and Sheppard’s voice in his ear. “Rodney, come in,” he’s saying impatiently. “For Christ’s sake, it’s not like there’s anywhere you could have gone. Hello?”

He tries to say something, but it sounds like _rrrmrlph_. His headset has slipped of sideways and he can’t find the button.

Someone’s hand plucks it off his head so that he’s fumbling for nothing. “He’s out cold,” Ronon says into the mouthpiece. He’s making eye contact with Rodney as he says it. He’s lying like a cheap rug. A large, shaggy, cheap rug. “Let him sleep, huh?”

“I’m awake,” Rodney says, rubbing his eyes. But he only says it after Ronon has cut the headset off and set it back on the table. “Did you, uh.... Did you ever get your grand tour?”

He feels bad now. He never _means_ to be...difficult to like. He’s really hungry. His blood sugar has probably been low for a long time. Ronon’s not such a nuisance. Actually, he practically never makes a nuisance of himself. Or makes...noise. Or anything like that.

“Nah,” Ronon says.

He dumps out Rodney’s water and gets him some more, hot. He’s got a stash of tea bags in his coat pocket: darjeeling, vanilla spice, and lemon zinger. He looks at the back of the darjeeling packet and says, “What’s in this one? Is there citrus?”

“Never mind, give me the vanilla,” Rodney says. Ronon opens it for him and drops it in the hot water. Honestly, Rodney thinks, he’s capable of making tea by himself. He doesn’t say it, though.

*

“Can I say something?” Ronon says, a lot later.

Rodney stops moving, the stylus to his Palm Pilot in one hand, his third cup of vanilla spice in the other. Ronon’s still there.

Ronon’s still there? No, there again. He left at one point, Rodney’s sure. He would have noticed, if Ronon had just been...standing there that whole time, watching him work. Rodney checks his watch, but he doesn’t know what he’s comparing the current time to. “What?” he says, when he realizes Ronon expects an actual answer.

“Maybe you think I don’t like you,” Ronon says. “I do, though.”

He doesn’t know what to say. Nobody Rodney knows ever has conversations that start out that way. If they do, they’ve been keeping it a secret from him, which is reasonable, because he would mock.

He looks at Ronon, leaning against the closed door of the kitchenette, his shoulders stiff and his hands hanging at his sides, his head ducked a little bit. Rodney feels no impulse to mock at all. “I know you do,” he says. “We’re...we’re a team. Right?”

Ronon shrugs. “I don’t know what to say to you sometimes. Or. I don’t know what to say to you, ever.”

“Yes,” Rodney says. “Exactly. We don’t have much occasion to talk, or anything to talk about, but that doesn’t mean we don’t like each other, does it? We can be friends without...spending time together. I felt the same way about Ford.”

Ronon looks up. He is not happy. He is, in fact, more than a little pissed off, by the looks of it.

“Not that you remind me of Ford,” Rodney says quickly. “Except for – for being on the team with me, and liking guns. Superficial similarities, at best.”

“I would never kill a man who was tied up,” Ronon says. “I’d let him down first.”

So would Ford, or he would have...before. Rodney would rather drop the subject, however, so he says, “I know. Absolutely.”

“The volcano thing,” Ronon says uncertainly, like he’s not sure if Rodney is still listening to him. Rodney looks up from his Palm Pilot and nods encouragingly. He never means to be hard to like.... “That was a really close one,” Ronon says, and smiles tentatively. “Thought for a minute or two we’d had it.”

“Three cheers for _The Daedalus_ ,” Rodney says. It comes out sarcastic, but he doesn’t exactly not mean it. Or, that is, he does mean it.

It’s been a six-miracle day, but he knows he doesn’t have seven in him. He couldn’t have saved Ronon and Teyla. There was nothing.

Ronon puts his hands in his pockets. Rodney wonders if he’s making more tea, but he just stands there with his hands in his pockets. “You ever think about stuff? If you think – when you think you’re gonna die, do you think...about stuff in your life?”

He doesn’t. There’s never any time. He’d never thought about self-reflection in the face of your inevitable destruction as a luxury, but it is. “I suppose,” he says.

“I thought about how I never knew how to say it right – how to talk to you. So you were always going to think of me as some dead guy who didn’t like you very much.”

“No,” Rodney says. He doesn’t know how he would have remembered...if _The Daedalus_ hadn’t.... Not that way, though. Not like that, he’s sure.

Maybe as one more lost soul that Rodney didn’t know the way he should – one more friend he never quite got around to making, which should mean it’s easier to say goodbye, but it never is.

“I don’t know what to say to you,” Ronon says again. He sounds plaintive. Plaintive sounds very strange in Ronon’s deep voice. “I don’t know about the stuff you like to talk about. But you’re brave.”

“I’m not.”

“Yeah, you are. And you make us able to be brave. We can go anywhere, places no other team would go into, or that they wouldn’t stay in, because we know you’ve got us. So I wanted...now that it’s not too late to tell you, I guess I’m telling you. You have my life in your hands, all the time. I like knowing that. I like you.”

“Okay,” Rodney says in a small voice. Ronon smirks at him, and he realizes that’s a stupid thing to say. “Thank you.”

Ronon goes away again. Rodney looks down at his hands. They aren’t shaking anymore.

*

There aren’t enough passenger berths for all the refugees. They convert some cargo holds. Ronon spends a lot of time finding all the objects he can find that aren’t completely solid or rotting away to make pillows and blankets out of. Rodney spends a lot of time tracking down glitches in the sensor codes on the engineering level. It’s not a long ride back, but everyone is exhausted. It feels longer than it is.

Rodney gets lost. Maybe someone should have given him a tour.

Ronon is going through the same power chamber, the opposite direction. “I’m completely turned around,” Rodney said. “This is absurd, the damn ship is non-Euclidian. Trust Sheppard to find the one– “

They’re alone. Displays all around them scroll diagnostics in Ancient, except for the ones that don’t work, that are just covered with quivering green blocks of light.

He looks at Ronon’s face, and suddenly he can’t speak. There’s nothing to say. Ronon is looking at him, looking and looking at him and not looking away. He moves closer, awkwardly. He squints, like Rodney is too bright to look at directly. Rodney moves closer on nothing but instinct. He’s not thinking. He doesn’t know what he thinks.

Ronon puts his hands on either side of Rodney’s face, long-fingered, callused hands. He could probably break Rodney’s neck like this, but it never occurs to Rodney to be scared. Not even a little bit. He leans down over Rodney and says in a rough, unexpectedly small voice, “I still didn’t say– Fuck, this is so hard.”

Rodney pats his arm clumsily, just above the elbow. Smooth skin, smooth muscle. His arm quivers slightly under Rodney’s palm. “It’s okay,” he says. He doesn’t know if it’s okay or not, but it should be. If there’s any justice in the universe, this one thing should turn out okay.

His eyes open wider, and there are tears caught in his eyelashes.

Rodney has no frame of reference for this. He doesn’t know what happens next. He wipes a shimmering, damp spot underneath Ronon’s eye with his thumb. “It’s okay,” he says again. He can do lilting, cooing nonsense. He can.

“I didn’t mean to waste a whole year,” Ronon says. “But it’s really...hard sometimes...to believe things can really be okay now. I learned not to want stuff, not to hope. I didn’t know how to start again. I thought I didn’t know how to start again, but then I thought I was dying, and all of a sudden I felt – I just wanted to see you so bad, tell you all this stuff I hadn’t ever– “

”Shh,” Rodney says. He rubs his thumb over Ronon’s cheek, and Ronon tilts his face into it like a giant cat, like a lion and a kitten at the same time. “You’re safe now.”

“While we can breathe, there’s hope,” Ronon says, faintly distant. He’s talking across a long distance, talking right past Rodney.

Rodney wants him to be thinking about _Rodney_. He draws Ronon’s face down by that one touch on his cheek and meets his lips.

*

They make one concession to reality: they turn off their headsets. That’s all, though. Rodney doesn’t give a damn about anything else. Let somebody come find them. Let somebody try to stop them.

It’s a six-miracle day, and Rodney’s not tapped out yet.

Ronon kisses like a tropical storm, waves of light rain and hard rain and then everything bending in the wind, everything that can’t reshape itself to his strength just snapping in half. Rodney has forgotten how to be afraid. He slips his arm under Ronon’s shirt, thin sleek leather and muscle and bone and flawless skin. Ronon grabs his hips and helps him ride everything out.

He probably breaks something terribly fragile and Ancient when his back hits the wall. He doesn’t care. He puts his arms around Ronon’s neck and holds on. Their legs are tangled so tightly together that Rodney almost can’t find his own. Ronon puts one arm under his ass and hikes him up, higher and tighter against Ronon’s body, and his legs spread whorishly. He’s holding all of Ronon between them, hard thighs and compact hips and warm cock and those freakishly perfect abs. He makes a high, agitated sound when Ronon pulls his mouth away. “Not so loud,” Ronon mutters, and turns to kissing up the tendon of Rodney’s neck.

When he puts his hands on the zipper of Rodney’s fly, he stops. Rodney whines and tries to kiss him some more.

Ronon waits. Eventually, Rodney catches on, even though he’s not at his mental best.

“Yes,” Rodney says roughly. “Yes, it’s okay, you can. Please.”

Ronon uses both hands, one after the other, over and over, and Rodney arches his back away from the display panels and trembles from head to toe and chokes over the words when he tries to beg. Not that he has to. Ronon’s already all over it.

*

Here’s how it goes:

Rodney is a gentleman. He assures Ronon he understands perfectly about stress and adrenaline and near-death and affirming life. He can’t stop stroking Ronon’s sweaty-sticky thigh as he says it, long legs wound around him, chin poking uncomfortably into Rodney’s shoulder, lax hands ghosting through Rodney’s hopelessly scrubbed-up hair, close to the scalp.

It might not be a good time, and Rodney understands that.

“You scared?” Ronon asks. He means it. He’s not making fun. He wants to know.

Rodney wants to say yes, terrified, but he’s not. The absence of fear makes him feel unstuck, unmoored. Floating almost out of reach.

He says no. He means it.

History always vindicates the righteous. He shares this theory with Ronon. Ronon says, “Dead men don’t read history books.”

Rodney plans to write his memoirs, when the Atlantis expedition is declassified. There will be a chapter on how they found _The Orion_ and how Rodney made it fly when it should never have been able to fly. It’s going to be a serious book, so he won’t be able to put in the parts about Ronon. He’ll be in the Acknowledgments, of course, along with everybody else -- everybody who matters, all the cool kids.

Rodney won’t have to write this down to remember it. He rubs his face against Ronon’s beard until it burns.

Seven-miracle days don’t just grow on trees, after all.


End file.
